Roadshow proves Titanic is unsinkable

Ethel Rudolph’s mother was Anna Sophia Turja, a Finnish woman two months shy of her 19th birthday when she boarded Titanic. Her ultimate destination was Ashtabula, Ohio, to work for relatives who owned a market.

A passenger in third class, she didn’t speak English and didn’t fully understand what was happening during the 2 hours and 40 minutes it took for the ship to sink. She listened to a band play for a while. She wound up in a life boat, one of the last launched, because a crew member picked her up and put her there.

“One of her worst memories was hearing the screams of those 1,500 people freezing to death in the water,” Rudolph said. “One by one the voices would stop. That memory lived with her all of her life.”

Turja married and had seven children. She died in 1982.

Rudolph, 88, lives in La Mesa. She remembers her mother being interviewed by reporters on Titanic anniversaries. She remembers her mother in hushed conversation with a man from Finland whose wife and five children had died in the disaster. “He wanted to learn whatever he could about his family’s last days on Earth,” she said.

Her mother “lived the rest of her life with an attitude of gratitude,” Rudolph said. “She never could get over the fact that she was saved, a young Finnish woman traveling by herself, while all those rich people drowned.”

In 1953, Turja was invited to a screening of “Titanic,” a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb. It was her first exposure to Hollywood magic. She emerged in tears and told reporters, “If the cameramen were so close, why didn’t someone help us?”

Family members finally convinced her the movie wasn’t real, and that, too, became something she never forgot. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, Anna Turja refused to believe it.

Boarding passes

Each visitor to the Natural History Museum exhibition is handed a boarding pass. On the back is the name of one of the Titanic passengers and a short biography.

The idea is to make it feel as if you are that person on the ship. You walk past a huge piece of one of the engines, a replica of a first-class cabin, a life-size photo of the grand staircase. There’s an iceberg panel, freezing cold to the touch.

Throughout, display cases hold reminders of everyday life: tool handles, dinner plates, letter openers, wine bottles, money, a jar of cold cream. All are among the 5,500 artifacts that RMS Titanic has salvaged over the years, despite the objections of some survivors’ families and Robert Ballard, the oceanographer and former San Diegan who discovered the wreck in 1985.

In the exhibition’s final gallery, visitors can scan a list of passengers and crew to learn the fate — survived or perished? — of the person on their boarding pass.

This is where items that have been linked to specific passengers are displayed, too. Adolphe Saalfeld’s perfume bottles. (He survived.) Marion Meanwell’s hair pin. (She didn’t.) Information boards on the walls tell their stories.

In another 100 years, the stories may be all that’s left of Titanic; the wreckage is being consumed by iron-eating microbes. And RMS Titanic plans to auction all the artifacts on April 11 (contingent on allowing current exhibits to continue).

If the first 100 years are any indication, the stories will be enough.